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Effigy Mounds National Monument

The chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee has asked Interior Department Secretary Sally Jewell to provide his committee with a briefing on "the scope of mismanagement and conservation of national and cultural resources" at the National Park Service.

Buried towards the bottom of a 50-page report examining how managers of Effigy Mounds National Monument could have cast aside concerns of archaeological resources in a site rich with them and which was established to protect them was a disturbing admission: the National Park Service as a whole is dysfunctional when it comes to cultural resources management.

Charging that the National Park Service "circled the wagons" in assessing how a former superintendent of Effigy Mounds National Monument in Iowa was able to run roughshod over the monument's sacred grounds for more than a decade, a watchdog group said the agency failed to put adequate reforms in place to ensure something similar doesn't happen in the future.

Anyone who has heard Terry Tempest Williams speak or who has read her writing knows how personal her approach is to her subject, thus the “personal topography” of the subtitle of this book. Visits to 12 units of the National Park System, including seven national parks, two national monuments, a national military park, national seashore, and national recreation area, provide grist for her exploration of this topography and a sampling of different elements of the system.

A former superintendent of Effigy Mounds National Monument who admitted taking skeletal remains of Native Americans from the monument so they couldn't be repatriated with tribes must serve 10 weekends in jail and a year of home detention, pay a $3,000 fine, and make restitution in the amount of nearly $109,000.

As the National Park Service continues to recover from perhaps the darkest chapter in its history at Effigy Mounds National Monument, officials are developing a Cultural Landscape Report and Environmental Assessment to understand exactly what the monument's landscape contains and to develop a management plan going forward.

A former superintendent of Effigy Mounds National Monument in Iowa has pleaded guilty to theft of artifacts from the site, and has agreed to pay $108,000 in restitution, according to the National Park Service.

A scathing, 15-page "Serious Mismanagement Report" that examined how National Park Service staff at Effigy Mounds National Monument came to desecrate the site doesn't officially exist, according to Park Service officials.

Ancestral burial grounds and ceremonial mounds at Effigy Mounds National Monument in Iowa that were considered sacred by a dozen Native American tribes were desecrated by National Park Service managers who "clearly knew what they were doing was against the law" during a decade-long campaign of building boardwalks and trails across the monument grounds, according to a voluminous investigation.

The vast sea of grass called the prairie is now just a memory in most of North America, but a few protected and restored remnants still remain. If you'd like to help with prairie restoration projects, several NPS areas are looking for volunteers during the next several weeks.